In a string of luck, AMD's best graphics solution for this season comes a good three weeks before Spore and Crysis Warhead has a chance to whisper, "Peek-a-boo!" You can bet that every brand out there who's been sticking with ATI video cards has a special kit for you bleeding edge techies, but just how much moolah are we going to shell out for a Radeon HD 4870 X2? Learn more at the full story.

Using a naming convention that will keep fans swapping "GTX" side to side, NVIDIA's newest generation of video cards has just been announced over press waves. The GeForce GTX 280 and the GTX 260 are the initial models pushed out by the graphics manufacturing company for the new line known officially as the GTX 200 (note how the GTX prefixes the model numbers). This new family is an old idea improved - it's based on similar G80 architecture, but significantly improved in computing power. More details can be had at the full story.

Upgrading your PC can be a very complicated thing, but it seems that NVIDIA is going to try and make things just a bit more customer-friendly, and how Content Business Development VP Roy Taylor thinks that it's a challenge for the company to overcome. Here's hoping that they do manage to pull this one off. Check out all the details in the full article, and see what this one means to you.

The developers from NCsoft have found a bug in Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa patch 1.5 which is causing some problems with certain video cards. This is a bit of a drag considering a lot of players were pretty excited about this update. If you want to know more about this bug, head on over to the full article.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl developer GSC Game World has decided to play twenty questions and answer just some of the fan feedback they've been receiving on the sequel of their well-loved FPS series. The Community Q&A session tackled the development of its upcoming S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky as well as other interesting issues.

Read more about what the developers had to say in the full article after the jump!

 

Scaleform Corporation has just sent out a press-wire announcing that they are now releasing Scaleform GFx as a third-party Software Developer's Kit (SDK) for Nintendo Company Ltd.'s Wii console. This news comes in shortly after the company announced that the same dev kit has been released for use on the Sony PlayStation 3 and PSP consoles. In line with this latest announcement, Scaleform president/CEO Brendan Iribe had this to say:

We made sure the Scaleform GFx architecture works well with existing game engines on Wii, as well as new ones. Moreover, Scaleform GFx delivers a range of cursor features designed to take advantage of the Wii Remote's enormous potential. With Scaleform GFx, developers can have the best of both worlds: artist-based data-driven content and hardware-accelerated scalable graphics.

As a further backgrounder, Scaleform GFx is built on the Scaleform VGx hardware accelerated vector graphics technology, which tessellates vector graphic shapes into triangles that modern 3D video cards can render. On the gaming side of this news, it's always good news to hear that another developer's kit is available for use on our favorite consoles. After all, it potentially means more - if not better - games in the near future.

Some early adopters have noticed something wrong with some of the anti-aliasing on Macs, particularly in iTunes Coverflow. According to a blog post by Bryce Kerley, he surmises that "the scroll bar and volume slider in iTunes Coverflow full screen get drawn by some anti-aliased method while the buttons are probably bitmaps."

By trial and error, he's pretty much discovered that some anti-aliasing done on Macs is video card-dependent. This is corroborated by some images he took of the program running on different machines using different video cards. You can check out a few of the comparison shots by clicking on the "read" link below.

Other reports from Mac users have flagged the issue as a bug in the program. Apparently, once the Coverflow window is resized the anti-aliasing problem goes away. Kerley says, though, that he has also encountered the same problem as well as the same fix in OmniWeb's Downloads window when using Expose. As of now, there's been no official word from Apple about it.

 

GameInformer has scored a few more bits of information regarding the Half-Life 2 Orange and Black Boxes. According to the website, Valve's Doug Lombardi clarified that console users will only be able to purchase the Orange Box, while PC users have a choice between the two.

Both the Orange and Black Box editions of Half-Life will be available at either retails stores or via Steam (for PC users only, of course). When these editions launch, you won't be able to buy the contents separately. You'll have to buy the whole package.

Speaking of consoles, a Wii release from Valve is also something that has sparked a lot of fan discussion. While Valve currently has no Wii projects in development, Lombardi stressed that "the company was quite surprised by the interface and wouldn't rule out anything just yet."

Lombardi also cleared things up regarding the delays that have surrounded Half-Life 2: Episode 2. While a lot of people believed that the next installment was delayed to include the two other games, Lombardi said that this wasn't the case. According to Lombardi, "Nothing is done yet. Portal is the closest, but it's not done today."

Those who have already upgraded their PCs' video cards to support Direct X 10 will also be happy to find out that both Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 will support Direct X 10. Valve also plans to include Direct X 8 support, and the company is also planning to support the older Direct X 7, but no confirmation has yet been made regarding the latter.

Some reports have pegged the release of all three versions of the packages as Winter 2007 but according to Lombardi, the current schedule is to release them concurrently in the Fall.

The guys from Turbine and Codemasters have just announced that they will be launching the Stress Test for the MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar very soon. Scheduled to begin on February 23, the event will last until February 26.

Raffle prizes. This is a great opportunity for interested players to try out the game before it goes into Open Beta, and on top of that, players who participate in the event (as well as closed beta players) will also have shots at winning prizes that the devs will be giving away. Participants will be entered into the raffle for one of the three NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX video cards which are up for grabs.

Stress test. In any case, for those who may not be familiar with what a stress test is, it's basically a period when the devs will allow as many people as they could find to log in to the game servers at the same time. This is to test the server's capacity and see how it will perform under heavy loads. Those who will be participating in a stress test for the first time are advised to expect bad lags, bugs, and the occasional crash. Hopefully, though, the help provided by the participants will allow the devs to take care of whatever needs to be fixed before the game goes public.

Besides, despite the expected crashing and lagging, the guys behind LOTRO are trying their best to sweeten the deal, AND it's free. So, if you've got nothing to do on the dates we just mentioned, then just drop by Turbine's website and sign up for the event.

Gamespot's got a great performance tutorial for all the World of Warcraft fans out there who want to get the best-looking and fastest Burning Crusade gameplay on their current system. If you've just grabbed a copy of Blizzard's epic MMO or its expansion, then you should probably read up on what you'll need, so you can get the most out of your purchase.

Now, Gamespot's guide talks about four different aspects that you'll need to look at on your current set-up (Game Settings, Graphics Card, Processor, and Memory), but we know not everyone likes reading through all of that. Here are three things you ought to know about getting the most out of your hardware from Gamespot's notes, as well as our own.

Tip One:

If you're using mid-range hardware, such as GeForce 7-series and a 2-gig Athlon with 1 GB of memory, then you can actually run WoW with most of the max settings intact. When you experience some in-game slowdown, your best bet to increase performance is to put your Draw Distance settings at minimum, followed by disabling shader detail. Those two settings have the greatest impact on the game's ability to run, but also manage to take a good chunk out of your image quality as seen above.

Tip Two:

On the chance that your computer isn't really doing the job you want it to with your current hardware setup, your best bet is to upgrade your RAM. World of Warcraft's ability to run well is impacted less by processing speed as the amount of memory you use. While their guide shows no appreciable difference between using 1 Gig and 2 Gigs of RAM, you'll have more leeway with your video settings with the additional memory.

The full article awaits after the jump!